You Don’t Have to Know Everything

There’s no need for you, me or others to try to learn everything. Besides being quite a lot wasted time it is impossible. I encourage to do much by yourself. I encourage you to learn programming, marketing, culture, sales, business, design, modding, graphics, team management, product planning, productivity to some extent, but I don’t think it’s best use of your time to try to be the best Java programmer and the best 3D modeler in the world. I believe it’s much more efficient to concentrate on getting professionals near you. Get the best Java programmer and the best 3D modeler to work with you. Concentrate on being the best game producer and focusing the areas which you can handle.

It’s not necessary to know everything, it’s much more efficient to gather around professional developers who can help you with specific questions that are outside of your knowledge.

9 Comments

Thanks for the further thoughts on this, I can see it comes down to how you gauge the value of the consultant/authority’s knowledge–I suppose we’re talking about reputation here, and how that affects knowledge-transfer.

By “question authority” I intended the main point to be: “if you believe somebody just because he is an ‘authority'” then you are not thinking by yourself. If you think that ‘you should have working version after each coding session’ only because I said it, then there’s a logical fallacy. If you try the system and find it ok for you, then you can say it was ok. But basically, whatever I say you shouldn’t “believe” just because I say it. Of course if you are reading the texts and find these posts reliable or something that you can use, you might start thinking that you can generally believe in me. Still, that doesn’t mean that you would need to agree on every entry I make. Referencing authority may carry a high enough probability of truth that it would be correct to base decisions on it.

Another good example could be: “God exists because Bible says so”. Even if something is said in books (or news or by your teacher) doesn’t make it truthful just because of that.

“Ask from people who know”. As mentioned before… if you know a programmer that has coded AIs 3 finished games and has made a master’s thesis on AI and gives you an example AI code demo where you can see pixels hunting other pixels, then you have got evidence that the guy can do (or know) something. Therefore, this guy could be one of those to gather around. If you know a self-made millionnaire, maybe he knows how to get rich, and could assist you on that. If a person has solid merits and he can prove what’s he really done (like, a self-made millionnaire can (*can*, doesn’t necessarily have, but *can*) have bit better business skills than a guy that got the money after his parents passed away).

I need to make another post about this… and make it really clear this time.

Juuso, I wonder if you could comment on how the suggestion of “Ask from people who know” relates to your earlier suggestion of “Question authority, make your own conclusions based on what’s said, not who said it.” From your point of view, do these suggestions compliment each other or do they contradict?